He said it was up to him, really. All of that.
They were in San Cristóbal de las Casas. It was a beautiful town and there were books in the shops and real coffee in the tourist cafés. It was the centre of the rebel movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and Elaine felt that she was in an important place at an important time. She hoped it would work out well for the people here, and also for her and Tim, that they would always be in love, and drink good coffee, and that he would always keep his hair.
5.
Back in Dublin, she unpacked the dressing gown with the flowers on the back and said, I have to get another job, I have to do something, I can’t stand this fucking country. It’s all right for you.
We could live in France, he said.
She rounded on him and said, What do you do? What are you for?
He lifted his empty hands in the air.
This fucking country, she said. You have no idea. Come down to Cork with me. That’ll change your mind.
But he loved them all, and they loved him. Her brothers bringing him down to the local for a pint and her father talking about tornadoes in America, and was he ever in one, at all? And it was all the Big Yank in the front parlour, and no one asked them once about Italy, or Mexico, or the North Circular Road for that matter. No one asked anything, except would he like a cup of tea, because in this house, it became clear, questions were out of the question. She had never noticed this before. Questions were impolite. And Tim better at this game than any of them — not looking at the tablecloth or at the cup in his hand, or at any of their sad, accumulated objects, but instead engaging in a vast discussion about all kinds of weather, from the ice on Lake Michigan to the storm in Bucharest that made your hair stand up with the static.
You don’t say, said her father, his small stash of books behind him, dead on the shelf.
They gave him the sofa to sleep on, so Elaine crept downstairs in the middle of the night and they had the quietest sex known to mankind. They inched their way along the floor and ended up under the table where, looking up, Elaine saw a crayoned boat she had drawn, one endlessly idle afternoon, when she was nine or ten. A green boat with a blue sail. Her own secret sign.
Where do you want to go? he said. Where do you want to go, now?
WHAT YOU WANT
If I had three wishes; the thing to do is get three more. ‘Hello,’ says the angel, says the fairy, says the devil even, ‘What do you want? One. Two. Three.’ And I say, ‘Well, first off, I’ll have three more of those please,’ and then you have five, you see, to play with, which is two extra, because there’s always a trick.
Like you might say, ‘Well, for my first wish, I’d like to have a beautiful body,’ and azzakazzam, ‘There’s your beautiful body,’ says the angel and, when you look down, you’re still the same old yoke and the angel says, ‘Well, it is beautiful — the way one bone fits into another, and the blood flows, and the brain works and all that,’ and maybe, yes — in the scheme of things — but, ‘No!’ you say, ‘No!’ and you blurt out something like, ‘I want a body like Raquel Welch,’ and of course she’s ancient, these days, so all you get is a heap of silicone and arthritis. Or even worse, you ask for a body like Marilyn Monroe, who is actually dead, not to mention rotten, or you ask for the body of ‘a film star’ and the angel gives you Marlon Brando. Or you get the actual body of an actual film star like, say, Nicole Kidman’s body, and she sues — quite right too — because there she is wandering around in your old sack and everyone says it’s just prosthetic, like that stupid nose she wore. Serve her right.
So the third wish then, has to put it all right. You think about it really hard and you say nothing for ages, and then very carefully you say, ‘I’d like a body like the one Raquel Welch had in One Million Years B.C.,’ and dah dah! — the full thing down to the furry bikini, except it leaves out your face, and you’re some sort of monster oul’ wan with a dynamite bosom, like those plastic things men wear on stag nights. Or your face does change — because your face is part of your body, of course it is — and your grandchildren don’t recognise you and no one will let you back into your own house and you end up in a state of semiprostitution just trying to get the bus fare back to the place where the angel disappeared into the clear blue sky.
It’s all just semantics, as my son Jimmy would say.
The thing to do, I say, is to ask for the extra three wishes first, then you have enough to put it right. And the way you put it right is to ask for the body you had in the first place, of course, the same heap of old bones that gets you up on to the bus in the morning, and after that you still have a couple of wishes left. And with the next wish you say, ‘I would like to have three more wishes, please.’
You see?
Mad. It’s the kind of thing that rolls through your head, in this job, when you’re sweeping or wiping — it’s very repetitive, cleaning. It’s all over and back: over and back again. Your mind starts to run in some terrible groove, and you have to pick the right one or you end up with bombs on the underground and everybody you ever loved lying in the morgue. I can go from a cigarette butt to the Great Fire of London before I have the ashtray cleaned, so I stay in late and listen to the singing. I stand in the dark at the back of the hall, because you have to watch your head, you have to pick something positive to think about, as my son Jimmy tells me, like winning the lottery, though he doesn’t approve of that, either. Because I’ve had my ups and downs.
It never ends. Cleaning. It never ends. Here we go, back to the start, clean what has been cleaned and then clean it again. I start at the top of the house and work down, parterre, boxes, stalls. I hear the other girls hoovering or calling, and we pass each other on the stairs. I don’t smoke. A lot of the girls smoke. But it puts miles on you, trekking up and down to get out to the back door. No. I get an early start — something pleasant — the brasses, or the woodwork, way at the back where no one goes. Sometimes they start rehearsing before we are done, just bits and scraps, but I love the singing. And the odd time, there’s something special on, and the audience are in on top of you before you know it. Not that they notice me. People don’t. They look but they don’t see — which is fine by me. I’m the invisible woman, that’s what I say. I could shimmy backwards across that stage on my hands and knees and no one would bother, so long as I had a floorcloth going. Everyone so dressed up, they see nothing, except looking for their own reflection in the fancy togs.
I was down there on the circle steps, one time, trying to get some chewing gum out of the carpet, horrible stuff, when a man walks by, in his full rig, and he says to me, ‘You’re singing!’ and I said, ‘Am I? I didn’t even notice,’ and he says, ‘Ah! you’re Irish. Isn’t it marvellous the way the Irish sing while they work?’ And I said, ‘Yes, isn’t it?’
And you know, I have about sixteen things to say to him if he ever stopped by again. Like, ‘Oh, that’s not me, that’s just a tape of Maria Callas I’ve got stuck up my arse.’ Or, ‘A cat can look at a king.’ I might say that, ‘A cat can look at a king.’
I am allowed to like the music. My son Jimmy loves it. He has a voice, he never touched a cigarette. He might come here, even, only he doesn’t want to bump into his old mother rooting for the dustpan in the cupboard by the bar.
I might like the opera, you see, but my son Jimmy owns the opera. Jimmy has all the CDs in their box sets. Jimmy was even gay for a while, and then he wasn’t gay, and I said to him, I can’t keep up. And I think, after all, that he wasn’t looking for sex of one kind or another, he was just looking for an education. Which he got. And he has it all now, down to the slice of lime in his gin and tonic, and he never — he very rarely — gives himself away.